Listen carefully to Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained and you might hear the sound of not one but two sets of lovebirds cooing.

This may be difficult to discern amid all the bullets, blood, rough language and racist inhumanity (including torture).

But the romances are there, and they’re keys to understating the thinking behind a film that might otherwise be dismissed as another work of violent style by a man who is no stranger to overkill.

The first love story is the film’s main narrative driver. Jamie Foxx is the title Django, a suddenly freed slave in pre-Civil War southern America (historians call it the Antebellum South) who aims to get back his beloved wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) — and also to get some payback.

Broomhilda has been taken from Django and forced into sexual bondage by Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), the childlike owner of a vast Mississippi plantation called Candyland. Enslaved blacks do Candie’s bidding and also that of his devoted house slave Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson).

Django’s rescue/vengeance quest teams him with German bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), who shoots people mainly for money but also does pro bono civil rights advocacy out of some quaint European notion of conscience.

Now for the second love story, which is the reason for the first. Django Unchained is Tarantino’s valentine to the spaghetti western genre, specifically the blood-splattered grindhouse movies of his 1960s-to-1970s youth made by Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci. He goes so far as to take his title from Corbucci’s 1966 movie Django, and to use that film’s star Franco Nero for an amusing barroom cameo in Django Unchained.

Besides paying homage to two Sergios, Tarantino also tips his Stetson to three bloody Sams — Fuller, Raimi and Peckinpah — who also share his filmmaking sensibility that all blood should come by the bucketful. To that end, he employs Peckinpah’s infamous exploding “squibs” (condoms filled with blood and meat) to maximize the visual splatter.

Tarantino also salutes a Monty, as in Python, in such scenes of lunacy as when Django and Schultz encounter a gang of Ku Klux Klan vigilantes who, not only can’t shoot straight, but they can’t see straight. Their hood eyeholes were badly sewn by a KKK member’s wife, you see — or rather, you don’t see. Jonah Hill makes a stunt cameo appearance for this scene, but Eric Idle and John Cleese might have been better picks.

Tarantino is clearly having a grand ol’ time with Django Unchained, and so are his actors, every one of whom are more than willing to share in the writer/director’s filmic vision, no matter how ghastly it may be.

The picture is also a grand long time. It indulgently runs to just 15 minutes shy of three hours, and since it lacks the looping structure of Tarantino’s masterwork Pulp Fiction, you feel the flab.

It’s a full hour before Django and Schultz even reach Candyland and meet Calvin Candie. Prior to that, they’re busy turning the Deep South into the Wild West, which includes a visit to a Tennessee plantation run by a slave trader named Big Daddy (Don Johnson). This interlude seems more like an excuse to revive the career of Johnson, whom Tarantino was a fan of long before Johnson’s ’80s stardom in TV’s Miami Vice.

Tarantino long ago decided he was just going to do what he wants to do in his films, and that includes using 21st-century profanity in a 19th-century setting (though he swears he’s historically accurate) and employing an eclectic (and effective) soundtrack that ranges from Jim Croce to Richie Havens to James Brown and 2Pac.

Yet Django Unchained is most certainly not a send-up of spaghetti westerns. Tarantino is making the type of film he has long adored, and working with actors familiar and new whom he wants to work with.

Nor is it just violence for the sake of violence, something everyone is sadly attuned to in the wake of recent tragedy in gun-obsessed America.

Tarantino is unstinting in his depiction of how slavery and racism worked on a daily basis in the Antebellum South. This included using men for blood sport (torn apart by dogs and in brutal “Mandingo” wrestling) and using women for vile sexual gratification.

These things are part of Django Unchained, in between the chuckles and carnage, because that’s how things were in 19th-century America, Tarantino asserts.

He wants us to think about this, to really think. You can’t say that about every Quentin Tarantino movie.